By: Celia Murray

Fred Johnson; Columnist

“Is it a good idea to have my children’s feet checked? My pediatrician has never really looked at them.”

Absolutely! Having your children’s feet checked is one of the most important things you can do for them.
Frankly, it’s very unfortunate that so little importance is placed upon the human foot by most health care professionals. Look at how much emphasis is placed on having your child’s teeth checked and they’re replaceable!
Your child’s feet are the foundation of their entire body. Many times the problems we see in children’s knees, hips and low back can be helped with proper foot positioning. It can also help them perform better in sports as well as avoid injuries.
I recently saw a young girl for example, who broke her foot while playing soccer.  Contrary to what she was told, this wasn’t a soccer “injury.” The tight calf muscles she had, made it impossible for her to pick her feet up properly while running and so she tripped, twisting and breaking her foot.
When you consider that in their average lifetime, your child will walk over four times around the world and carry over nine hundred thousand billion lbs of pressure on their feet (now that’s a number!), it might not be a bad idea to prepare those two “orphan structures” at the end of their bodies for the journey! You certainly would do the same for the tires on your car if you planned an extended trip.
If a foot problem is identified, parents are usually told that their children will outgrow it. The truth is you don’t outgrow most foot problems but to the contrary, you grow into them; i.e., the flexible, usually easily correctible problems seen, become fixed, rigid, often painful problems as they grow and develop. So the earlier a child’s foot problems are identified, the easier it is to correct them.

My 15 year-old son called, “I’ve got a big one.”

On the beach, he fumbled into his fish-fighting harness, a royal blue repelling, PVC chastity belt. A small crowd gathered; mothers, granddads, toddlers, some cute girls who walked down the beach in bikinis without care. Younger types still years away from worrisome tugs on bathing suit bottoms in futile attempts to cover rear ends suffering effects from decades of exposure to gravity.

For an hour my son, the snared beast and onlookers wandered eastward along the coastline. I asked,“How far out is it? Have you seen anything? Could it be a ray?”

The ray question sent him over the edge.

“MOM. I don’t KNOW!”

I gave him the “I gave birth to you” combined with “That is no way to talk to an adult, much less your mother” look.
He stared. “Mom. Please. You know how you get.”  I guess referring to me freaking out in situations I perceived a bit stressful.

My mother-in-law remarked, “It feels like someone’s in labor.” I didn’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies; but by now, I was powerful thirsty. I looked up and one of the young bikini-clad gals pulled something down the beach. A cooler!
More time passed with nothing but dark water. The cooler mysteriously disappeared and the constant banter from a Tallahassee woman who in two hours shared every minute detail of her life since the onset of menses, wore me paper thin. She divulged every intimacy, except what I most wanted to hear. An offer of a drink from the cooler her daughter had hauled through the sand.

Fred Johnson; Columnist

For some reason, Congress thinks that an electric car is the answer to our energy problems because they produce no pollutants and use no petroleum. GM has been ordered to produce electric cars by their new bosses (Congress). 
    However, there is one problem with that rosy picture. Electric cars must be recharged and as we put more electric cars on the road, more electric power plants must be built to generate the needed electricity. Currently, coal-fired plants provide close to one-half of our electricity. So we are basically replacing gasoline powered cars with coal powered cars. Hardly a way to reduce emissions.    Transportation uses 13 million barrels of petroleum per day.
    If we replace gasoline powered vehicles with electric powered vehicles, we must increase our generation capacity by the equivalent of 13 million barrels of petroleum per day.
    Note that we have not reduced our energy needs at all. We have replaced a very efficient system with a brand new system requiring the construction of new power plants, new transmission lines and a huge network of recharging stations all over the nation.
    Since electric cars get about 200 miles between charges and require many minutes (or hours?) to recharge, our highways will need many more service stations with lots of recharging ports. 
    And to what end?

By Celia Murray; Columnist

Last week saw what can only be described as a bizarre press conference by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford in which he confessed to having had an affair with a woman in Argentina.

\
    Formerly regarded as a leading Republican contender for the White House, Sanford is resisting calls for his resignation as governor. The fact of the affair was not particularly remarkable. Over the past few years we have witnessed many such scenarios played out in their various forms and involving politicians from both parties – Senator John Ensign (R-NE) and his affair with a campaign staffer, Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) and his infamous “wide stance,” Senator David Vitter (D-LA) and the call girls, Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) and the male page, Governor Elliot Spitzer (D-NY) and the prostitute, and, of course, President Bill Clinton and Monica.

\
    No one who watched Sanford’s press conference or read the series of e-mails between the Governor and the Argentine woman which were published in The State newspaper can doubt that the Governor is, simply put, in love.
    He is undoubtedly a man in pain and crisis as are, of course, his wife and children. Sanford’s tale is, unfortunately, not a unique one, but it does have a couple of uniquely troubling aspects.